Dylan circles back to the angling genre and Russell Chatham in this week’s edition of Book of The Week Wednesday.
The Angler’s Coast by Russell Chatham, Clark City Press
This is both a collection of beautifully written fishing stories and a heartbreaking document of loss. I first stumbled onto this book in the Corvallis (Oregon) Public Library when I was a kid, and I was enthralled by the tales of unbelievable fly-fishing adventures on the nearby Northern California coast. World-record striped bass. Days of multiple 50-pound-class king salmon on the fly. Double-digit steelhead sessions. I grudgingly returned the book long after its due date. When Chatham reissued the book in 1990, I was living in Northern California, and the realization of what had been there just a generation earlier made me feel as though I’d been robbed. Read this book if you can find it, and wherever you live, I will bet you’ve never experienced anything like the fishing Chatham had in California. I would take it as a warning to fight like hell to save whatever any of us have left because when it goes, it goes fast.
